Aviation Engineers

[John Seidts]

One of the pleasures of being a dealer of WWII items is that some interesting items come your way.  I am always on the lookout for items which pertain to my interest in WWII Liaison Squadrons, and one came my way the other day that I just had to share- US Army Technical Manual TM 5-255 Aviation Engineers, dated April 15, 1944.

I was trained as a Special Forces Engineer, and we built landing zones the hard way- C4, det cord, and indigenous labor to move the fallen trees out of the way, all the time sweating under the poncho hooch drinking jungle juice.  Foreign Internal Defense training is hell.  But they had it harder in WWII.  Airplanes were a huge national expenditure for the US, and part of the insurance for their performance was building adequate field facilities to operate the aircraft and house the flight and ground echelons and external support units which kept the AAF going.  The basic unit which accomplished this was the Aviation Engineering Battalion.  This work was not only done for the heavies- it was done for the light aircraft as well.  Going through this book, I realized I had no idea of the information, technology, and equipment which an Aviation Engineer Battalion had at its disposal to perform airfield construction duties.

Building an airfield was an involved process.  A thorough site reconnaissance was required, not only to look at the site, but to find suitable local materials to improve the ground to the point where a base and top surface could be constructed and maintained.  Soil testing, hydrological profiles, compaction samples, and sand and gravel sourcing were done at the site and at local material sources such as quarry pits or beaches.  Layout of the field was critical to ensure that enough dispersal of aircraft could be accomplished while allowing easy, quick access to active runways, sometimes on a compressed footprint due to land ownership issues.  All of this required big transport and machines- bulldozers, scrapers, bitumen heaters, asphalt spreaders, water trailers, and heavy GMC CCKW and Diamond T trucks to pull all the equipment.

And the logistics of making all this happen was big.  Many of us are familiar with the steel runways constructed in WWII.  From the pages of this manual, it turns out that it was more complicated than just throwing it down on the ground.  First, there were five different types of steel.  There was the pierced plank we all know about (Marston Matting, which was named after Marston NC, next town over from Camp MacKall, where it was first used in WWII), Heavy Bar and Rod, and Irving Grid which was a type of grating.  Then, there was light bar and rod and a roll of wire called Sommerfeld (invented in the UK).  The pierced plank came in bundles or packs of 30 planks, which weighed 1928 lbs per pack.  A 150’ x 5000’ runway required 60,000 units, which comes to 1928 tons and 32,084 cubic feet of cargo space.  A GMC CCKW 2.5 ton truck could carry two of the packs, so it took 1000 truck loads to get just the steel needed for this runway.  I did the math- a Liaison Squadron 50’ x 1000’ strip still required 67 truck loads of pierced planks.  According to the manual, 125 square feet could be layed per man hour.  For a liaison strip, that is 400 man hours, just to lay the steel!

This manual was a lucky find for me, and just right for my interests.  And now you too can bore people with esoteric history, and you didn’t have to buy the manual.  But I wanted to give you some idea of some of the support that went into making our L-5’s fly in combat in WWII.  It is not always apparent, but if you think of what it took just to get the 67 truck loads of steel manufactured into the pierced planks, shipped by rail down to sea ports, loaded on ships, routed to theatre ports, distributed into the theater, and sent to just one of the hundreds of airfields manufactured in WWII, the operation is mind boggling.

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